Scripted HTML version of Foils prepared 11 November 1996

Foil 4 Some Major Hardware Architectures - MIMD

From CPS615-Lecture on Computer Architectures and Networks Delivered Lectures of CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- 12 September 96. by Geoffrey C. Fox *
Secs 151.2
MIMD Distributed Memory
  • This is now best illustrated by a collection of computers on a network (i.e. a metacomputer)
MIMD with logically shared memory but usually physically distributed. The latter is sometimes called distributed shared memory.
  • In near future, ALL formal (closely coupled) MPP's will be distributed shared memory
  • Note all computers (e.g. current MIMD distributed memory IBM SP2) allow any node to get at any memory but this is done indirectly -- you send a message
  • In future "closely-coupled" machines, there will be built in hardware supporting the function that any node can directly address all memory of the system
  • This distributed shared memory architecture is currently of great interest to (a major challenge for) parallel compilers

© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Fri Aug 15 1997